the corn is planted in the raised places.'
'You care about their corn?'
'No, I care about leaving footprints you can see with a flashlight.'
She started off across the cornfield, taking two rows at a step, and Felker followed. She could hear him coming along behind her, and it made her comfortable, because if he had stepped on the soft ridges of dirt, it would have been silent. Now and then he stopped to glance up the highway, and that put him behind, but she didn’t care. He was tall and strong, and he wouldn’t have any trouble keeping up.
She angled away from the barnyard, where there would be animals to smell them and bring the farmer out. When they reached the windbreak of trees at the north end of the field, she stopped and touched Felker. He leaned down and she put her lips to his ear. 'We’ll watch from here.'
She set down her bag and sat on it, leaning against a tree trunk, the shotgun butt on the ground and the barrel upward. Felker slipped the backpack off his shoulders and sat by the next tree. It took five minutes. The Chevrolet’s headlights came over the horizon, aimed first up into the sky and then dipping at the crest of the hill. The car was moving fast, at least seventy, judging from the way it gobbled up the space between the telephone poles.
When the driver saw the car parked by the side of the road, he slowed down. There were no heads visible in the borrowed Ford, so the driver had a decision to make. The Chevrolet veered to the center of the road and passed the parked car at about the speed of a walking man. It proceeded a hundred yards farther, and then its lights went out before it stopped. The doors opened and three of the four men got out and started to walk back along the road.
Jane didn’t see the dome light go on, and she didn’t hear any door slam. None of this was reassuring. The one in the car left the lights off and kept going down the road, then stopped and turned around. It was too far from the parked car for Jane and Felker to have heard it if they were hiding on the floor. The three men on foot spread out when they were still a hundred feet behind the parked car. Two of them went into the fields behind the stone fences on either side of the road, and all three slowly approached the car. When one was in front of it and one on each side, they stopped, pulled guns out of their coats, and aimed them at the Ford.
Felker leaned close to Jane’s ear and whispered, 'If we’re going, shouldn’t we get started?'
She shook her head. 'I want to see one more thing.'
The Chevrolet began to move slowly up the road toward the parked car, its lights still off. When it was almost bumper to bumper with the Ford, it suddenly shot forward and rammed the back bumper to knock whoever was inside out of their crouch. The man on the road flung the back door open and aimed his gun. After a second he slammed the door in frustration, and the light went out before he turned his head.
'Now,' Jane said. She turned and crawled a few feet deeper into the windbreak and then stood up.
9
She went off at a slow jog, going due north, first among the trees and then across a second field. This one was unplowed and full of short weeds that whipped against the stiff denim of her jeans. When they reached the far side of the second field, she stopped and looked back. The headlights came on suddenly and bathed the Ford in a pool of whiteness.
Then she was running through the night across the fields, the bag over her left shoulder and the shotgun balanced in her right hand. She could hear Felker’s breathing behind her, and she judged that he had the stamina to keep running.
It was going to be possible if she could keep her vision clear. Everything about modem life made people think of the world as a network of roads. But in country like this, the roads were just the narrow borders of broad expanses of rolling, fertile farmland. The four men weren’t about to abandon their car in the dark and take off on foot across the fields after them. If they were like most people, they wouldn’t even think of it. They would already be searching a map for the place where Jane and Felker would come out on a road. The obvious thing to do was to take a loop, come out behind the men on Ridge Road, and hope to make it eastward into Lockport, where there would be lights and police. But what if she and Felker didn’t double back? If she remembered, if her vision was clear, there were no more big east-west roads between here and Route 18, just on the outskirts of Olcott.
Felker moved abreast of her and said between deep breaths, 'Where are we running to?'
She said, 'Olcott.'
'What’s Olcott?'
'About seven or eight miles.'
'What’s in Olcott?'
'Save your strength,' she said, then regulated her breathing again to bring in oxygen to keep her head clear. 'Don’t talk.'
They ran in silence then, and she lengthened her strides to match his, so the sounds of their feet struck her ear at the same time, a strong, rhythmic cadence, not a ragged pitter-patter pitter-patter that drained strength and wore out the runner. She kept her head up and tried to relax her shoulder muscles, but it was difficult carrying the shotgun and the leather bag that bounced against her hip at each stride.
She pulled the strap of the bag over her head so it went across her chest between her breasts and the bag was on her back. Then she slipped off her belt as she ran, and threaded it through the swivel on the end of the shotgun magazine, then through the trigger guard, and slung it tightly over her back so it was held against the leather bag. When she had done that, the running went faster.
It was a clear, cool April night, so the sweat formed and dried almost instantly, and the air came into her lungs like a cold intoxicant and came out in steamy huffs. She thought about Felker and listened to his breathing. He was disturbing. Jane had never taken a fugitive out of the world who had had this much trouble this early. Yet he seemed to be accepting it. She could hear him breathing deep, steady breaths, not short irregular gasps. He didn’t seem to be afraid. He had more to be afraid of than some of the people she had protected, less than others, but they had all been afraid. They had come to her because they had already tried all of the forms of shelter that people believed in: laws, blood relations, friends, even society’s capacity for simple outrage and disgust that a lone, powerless person had been laid open to evil. He had come that way too, but he wasn’t one of them. He wasn’t afraid.
They ran through the fields and pastures, thickets of small bushes and groves of old trees, once coming so near to a house that they had to duck a clothesline before they slipped along beside the white clapboards. There was a dark window in the back where she could see the ghostly blue glow from a television set on the ceiling, but no people. The night was empty now. They were all penned inside houses and cars, separated from the night by plates of glass and the electricity they immersed themselves in, thick blankets of sound and light and warmth.
Jane felt strangely elated. She could feel the air and the trees around her, and because she could feel them and because she was running, she was part of it too. She was straining, exerting her legs and arms and her eyes and ears to move across the land in a way that people didn’t do often anymore, without some machine or a pavement to keep the land away from them.
She never glanced at her watch, because time had a different pace now. She couldn’t measure mechanical time against a distance she had only guessed was seven or eight miles but might be five or ten, and wasn’t uniform and smooth and level like a track at the university. The pace of her feet was the only time that mattered, and she kept it steady and even, like the beat of a song without any tune and without any words.
She saw Route 18 coming from a long way off. There were three streetlamps somewhere off to her right and, far beyond the road, the glow of more lights in the sky.
The houses were coming more often now, and they were harder to avoid because they weren’t farms but suburban houses on smaller plots of land. Now was the time when she had to decide about the shotgun. Even when most people were asleep, she couldn’t take the risk of walking down a village street carrying a weapon. She said to Felker, 'Stop here.'
He came closer. 'What is it?' His breathing was hard and fast, and his voice was a little hoarse, like hers.
'Let’s catch our breath.'
